The First Middle Finger

by Brian Dunning
December 30, 2025

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Call it flipping the bird, flipping someone off, giving them the finger, giving them the bird, or simply the one-fingered salute, the infamous middle-finger gesture is so ubiquitous around the world and throughout history that much scholarly work has actually been done trying to track down its origin story. Where did it come from, what did it mean, and has that meaning changed throughout its long history? And is its history even all that long?

A quick word of disclaimer: This discussion necessarily includes phallic symbolism. Although the language is all clean, the concept is what it is; so if that doesn't work for you or anyone listening with you, please, turn this show off and rejoin us next week.

Let us begin by pointing our skeptical eye at the very most common false history attributed to the dreaded finger.

The Battle of Agincourt

This is one of the more popular claims: that English soldiers invented the gesture at the Battle of Agincourt to mock the French.

This battle in October of 1415 was one of the greatest victories of the English over the French during the Hundred Years War (1337-1453), which was over claims to the French throne. The English, who were greatly outnumbered yet had the terrain very much in their favor, supposedly threatened to cut off the middle finger of any French bowmen captured to make it impossible for them to ever draw a bowstring again. The gesture of showing or waving the middle finger was a taunt over what would happen to any prisoners.

But we can be pretty sure this is a false claim. There is no evidence from the historical period that any large number of bowmen ever had their middle finger cut off by their captors, nor is there is any evidence that the English made such a gesture during the Battle of Agincourt — a battle which was thoroughly documented by at least seven contemporary historians (known as heralds at the time), three of whom were present during the battle, and included both French and English. Not one of them recorded any mention of such threats or of excised middle fingers.

There are two more ways in which this explanation is illogical. First, bowmen were absolutely not the skilled people on the battlefield whom victors would need to cripple. Anyone can fire a bow and it takes very little practice to gain the basic competence needed to launch your arrow up into the air alongside a thousand others — battlefield bowmen were a brute force weapon, there was no need for them to be Legolas of the Woodland Realm. These were not knights; they had little value even for ransom. And second, cutting off the middle finger would hardly cripple a bowman. Most used the first three fingers, any two of which would do in a pinch; I've done a bit of archery and one day my friends and I competed using only our pinky fingers. (It was really hard and we had to switch to very light bows, but that was because we had zero practice.) You'd probably need to take the whole hand if your intent was really to prevent this person from ever firing another arrow.

Pluck Yew!

In a Medieval sense broader than just the Battle of Agincourt, there is a claim that bowmen of the period referred to firing the famous longbow, often made from the wood of a yew tree, as "plucking yew."

An extension of this holds that bowmen would often have their mothers fletch their arrows with pheasant feathers, giving rise to the phrase — careful with this one — "pleasant mother pheasant plucker;" and when you plucked your yew, you were sending these bird feathers to the enemy; in effect, "giving them the bird." It's almost like a room full of comedy writers riffed on this one for days.

Extending it further, some making this claim assert that the pl of pluck was a difficult sound for Middle English speakers, so it was gradually simplified into an f. Thus, we had the combination of the gesture with the modern commentary often delivered along with it.

This is easiest to dismiss, as linguists confirm there is no evidence of such a shift in pronunciation in English. Moreover, it makes no sense; when you draw and release a bow you're not plucking the yew — the wooden bow; you're plucking the bowstring.

However, we hardly need debate this, as it turns out there's plenty of evidence of the bird being many, many centuries older.

In Rome

The standard gesture familiar to us all, where the middle finger is extended upward and the curled fingers on either side represent the testes (or in family friendly terms, one is the frank and the others are the beans), is widespread and is understood essentially worldwide. This suggests common roots, according to some anthropologists. This would mean that the middle finger has been part of our nonverbal communication for a long, long time.

And indeed, we find it as far back as ancient Rome. Perhaps its most infamous appearance in history is attached to — who else — the Roman Emperor Caligula (12 CE - 41 CE), whose surviving reputation is one of depravity. He had a favorite habit of extending that finger when he held his hand out to be kissed. One of those he insulted in this way was Cassius Chaerea, one of his own Praetorian Guards, who later settled this account by leading the conspiracy that assassinated him.

In Rome they called this gesture the infamis digitus or digitus impudicus, for indecent finger. Another time its use was documented was when an actor threw the gesture at a heckler. Unfortunately for him, Augustus Caesar was also in the audience, and banned the actor from Rome for life.

There is an origin story for the gesture coming from Roman soldiers, in which they always wore a gold ring on their middle finger; and when marching into battle, they liked to taunt their enemy by holding up that finger to flaunt their comparative wealth. While this appears on the modern social media Internet in any number of places, I found no published instances of anyone putting it forward as an actual hypothesis. Moreover, there was no middle-finger gold ring worn by Roman soldiers; they wore whatever rings they pleased on whatever fingers they wished, same as anyone else.

It is recorded, however, that Roman soldiers were on the receiving end of the middle finger in at least one battle; it having been delivered to them by Germanic barbarians. There was no pretense of cutting off archers' fingers or showing off gold rings; the barbarians were simply telling the Romans where they could go and what they could do to themselves. However the source of this is a 2010 book by Thomas Conley called Toward a Rhetoric of Insult, which he attributed to the Roman historian Tacitus. Evidently, Conley failed to fact-check himself. Nowhere in the writings of Tacitus is there any mention of such a thing, or even anything close to it.

In Greece

It turns out that the bird goes back even centuries further, with a number of instances of the gesture having an obscene connotation in ancient Greek writings. It famously appears in the play The Clouds, a comical satire written by Aristophanes. First published and performed in 423 BCE, it features a character giving the finger to Socrates, then following it up by lifting his cloak and undergarment and waving the real thing at him. In the 330 BCE book Lives of Eminent Philosophers, the critic Diogenes gives it to the Athenian statesman Demosthenes as he calls him — best cover your ears for this — a demagogue.

Variations

In his 1994 book Bodytalk, the eminent public anthropologist Desmond Morris collected variants of the middle finder gesture from all around the world, and as you can guess, they all mean basically the same thing, and represent the same anatomical structure.

In Egypt the gesture is mostly the same, except rather than the back of the hand facing the subject, the hand is extended palm up, and the middle finger is bent upward at the middle joint, and the meaning is basically exactly the same. In some Arab cultures the hand is held the opposite way, palm down, and with the same bend in the finger at the middle joint; then the hand is spanked down (for lack of a better term) several times, miming the actual action. In Lebanon and Syria they might add smacking that hand into the other hand, indicating a more forceful version.

In places like Spain and Italy they do it the familiar way but often jerk the whole forearm upward with the opposite hand pressing down into the elbow. I was first on the receiving end of this in Milan, and it was by a cop. We were driving the wrong way down a one-lane, one-way street, accidentally of course (driving in Italy is not for the faint of heart). A cop car was coming straight toward us, but rather than deal with us, he simply drove up onto the sidewalk to get past us. As they went by, it was the partner in the passenger seat who flashed me the salute, though it wasn't quite on point as he was holding a cigarette.

The British Isles have their own version of the middle finger gesture, unique only in that it adds the index finger to form a V; back of the hand facing the person so insulted. It's the same as when a person from North America indicates a quantity of two, opening up the possibility for confusion and misinterpretation. There does not appear to be any consensus view on how or when or why this gesture got its start; researchers in the Isles have come up with lots of different stories. The one that's by far the most common is the bowmen at the Battle of Agincourt, who were allegedly taunted by the English with this gesture as if to say "We're going to cut off your first two fingers so you can't shoot arrows anymore," but as we know from more thorough research, this is false. It also doesn't make sense because an archer would hold those fingers together, not spread into a V. And so the origin of the V remains elusive.

Its reverse, with the palm facing outward instead, was popularized by Winston Churchill who signaled the word victory in this way. He got it from a Belgian lawyer named Victor who had always used it to represent his own name, and in a radio broadcast Victor suggested a propaganda campaign to signal victory over the Nazis. Evidently Churchill was listening that day.

So we may have debunked a few false explanations, but it can't be said that we nailed down a true point of origin for the bird. It would seem likely that it precedes written history — although its meaning has, apparently, remained remarkably consistent.

By Brian Dunning
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